Night and Day

MUSICAL EVENTS about Metropolitan Opera’s “Tristan und Isolde”... Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” arrives at the Metropolitan Opera for the first time in sixteen years. Wagnerites, who have been counting the days to this “Tristan,” are ravenous. At the two intermissions, and afterward in the midnight fog, you can hear opinions swirling: Does Dieter Dorn’s stylish, Prada-toned production serve the Master well? Is Ben Heppner up to the murderously difficult male lead? Is Jane Eaglen, for all her vocal splendor, too steely, too immobile, in her embodiment of Isolde? ...“Tristan” dwarfs and warps the ordinary world to which you are eventually forced to return... Look closer, and you realize that “Tristan” makes a project of destroying you. The musical language, with its slithering chromaticism and free-floating chords, has narcotic effects to which people in the latter half of the nineteenth century became notoriously addicted... The hypnotic simplicity of this “Tristan” was at its most potent in the endless love duet of Act II. Eaglen and Heppner were silhouetted against a deep-blue background, their voices displacing their bodies altogether. As reality dissolved into an incorporeal intertwining of musical lines, the lovers were incapable of obeying, or even of hearing, Brangane’s cry of “Beware!” By Wagnerian design, we in the audience didn’t get the message, either: Brangane’s warning, with its tones held over many beats, with its chords floating like lanterns in fog, blended all too smoothly with the whole. This, remarkably, is the sound of people not listening: the music is too strong for the meaning to be grasped... Everything that was missing in this “Tristan” became apparent with the stunning entrance of Rene Pape, as King Marke. Pape, possibly a bass for the ages, filled the house with a huge, golden tone and nailed down the text line by line. Emotion could be read in his voice and on his face. You knew even before he sang that his character had suffered a tremendous blow. For “Tristan” is much more than a tale of two people lost in mutual bliss: with an emotional honesty that these days would be considered outlandish, Wagner shows us the wreckage in their wake. Happiness between two people, he has the temerity to point out, may bring misery to others.... Dorn, in an intriguing revision of the final tableau, has Isolde end the “Liebestod” with her arms outstretched, as if she were prepared to sing on and on; Brangane and Marke, meanwhile, move dejectedly to either side of the stage, still telling the dire truth that no one wants to hear.